by JayasankaranKK
It’s amazing how fast later comes when you buy now! – Milton Berle, Comedian
We went to church on Christmas morn punctually, 30 minutes before Mass. But the cars parked there already signalled a massive turnout.
Sure enough, we couldn’t find a seat inside but had to settle for three seats deep in the madding crowd. All the three halls upstairs – which were live-streaming the service – were packed. And there were many who stood throughout.
The excess was due to people like us, who hadn’t been to church after Covid made on-line Masses respectable; those who went to church twice a year; and those who felt compelled to go because the year was ending. The excess was the majority.
The end of a year always has an effect on people because an end, any kind, signifies new beginnings, a fresh start, and such things generally go better – to the prudent at least – with divine help, ergo, Church on Christmas morn: six days before the New Year.
Time just zips past, doesn’t it? Example: Do you know it was a year ago today?
Its rapidity, the eternal change, can give you hope. “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided,” was how former German Chancellor and eternal optimist Konrad Adenauer saw it.
Or it can be understood as useless and hypocritical. “What is history but a pack of lies agreed upon,” snorted the great, if cynical, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was equally disbelieving: “History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.”
Everything’s relative. When I had my first job and living away from home for the first time, there was this recurring thought: why is there so much month left at the end of the money? There’s also the question of whether a minute is sufficient. Answer: it depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.
Then there is the opposite sensation, the feeling of sudden clarity, the lucidity of powerlessness.
I was looking around at the people in the house during Christmas Eve and realising that these were people I’d known for years, and accepting that time does, indeed, go on and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
It may be a great healer, but time’s a lousy beautician. It marches on, and as singer Dolly Parton complained, “sooner or later you realise it’s marching across our faces.”
2024 taught us that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t quite correct. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. And that, Donald Trump knew, was sufficient.
So, let’s brace for the future and cheer the present. Let’s welcome the New Year with pomp and circumstance, and begin making resolutions for a Better You that you have five days to formulate.
If time is any teacher, you will promptly start paving the road to hell with those intentions in the very first week of 2025 but don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
You can always start again next year.
WE